Although much of what was to have been the celebration of the 800th anniversary of Becket’s translation in 2020 was thrown into confusion by the Covid epidemic, enough survived, including a major British Museum exhibition (2021), to remind us of the extent to which Becket and his image became central themes in English medieval art. Following in the footsteps of Paul Binski’s Becket’s crown (2004) and Tom Nickson’s special issue of the Journal of the British Archaeological Association (2020) devoted to the Becket cult, the present lavishly illustrated collection offers an introduction and ten loosely connected chapters, each of which throws new light on old problems. Some, though in their way definitive, deal with single objects or types. Thus Kathleen Doyle draws attention to the pictograms used to signify Becket’s feast days in a dozen or so folded ‘concertina’ calendar almanacs produced in England from the 1380s onwards. En route, she supplies not only a wider conspectus of the range of images thus used, but a significant census of manuscripts. Rachel Koopmans revisits her work on images of the earliest Canterbury pilgrims, here drawing attention to glass-painting both at Canterbury (where she has worked such wonders over the past few years) and (from c.1450) at Nettlestead near Maidstone. Kay Brainerd Slocum suggests that the cycle of images in the ‘Becket leaves’ (purchased by John Paul Getty in 1986) was intended to display Becket’s essential loyalty to God amidst scenes of travel and feasting entirely appropriate to a noble audience. By contrast, Harriet M. Sonne de Torrens deals with the depiction of Becket as ‘miles Christi’ as displayed on the Danish Lyngsjö and Nora fonts, of c.1200 and c.1220, identified here not as products of Valdermerian royal patronage but potentially as an aspect of Cistercian propaganda for the Baltic crusades. A precocious reference here to the future King Canute vii adds yet further weight to the suggestion that William of Canterbury’s miracle collection is not a through-composed whole, but a compendium of incidents, only brought together definitively in the mid-1180s. In two related chapters, John Jenkins, Eliot Benbow and Frederick A. S. Lloyd Williams explore the various aspects of the Becket ’pilgrim’ badges. Williams charts the ways in which Becket’s iconography served as a model for later badges associated with the (ultimately still-born) cult of England’s Henry vi. Jenkins and Benbow offer a wider-ranging questioning of the extent to which such metal ‘toys’, including the representations of Becket riding a peacock (or on occasion even a chicken), are to be considered specifically devotional rather than as mass-produced, low status objects associated with civic ritual, on occasion produced far from what has previously been supposed to have been their chief source, at Canterbury itself. Leaping forwards to the nineteenth century Alyce A. Jordan deals with an altar in 1842 dedicated to St Thomas in Coutances Cathedral. Intended as thanksgiving for delivery from an outbreak of sweating sickness, this, she suggests, was deliberately situated so as to draw attention to older images in the building’s stained glass, presenting Becket as an obedient subject of the pope. Advertising Coutances’s usurpation, after 1789, of the functions of the demolished cathedral at Avranches (where in 1172 Henry ii had publicly received penance for Becket’s murder), it also served as a potentially provocative gesture, at a time when the Orléanist dynasty was attempting to secularise public health-care in the face of pro-Bourbon willingness to regard such phenomena as the cholera epidemic of 1832 as divine retribution for the revolution of 1830. All of these essays are illuminating or pose significant questions. Why, for instance, were so many of the metal ‘pilgrim’ badges deposited in rivers? If, as Nigel Morgan has argued, the ‘Becket Leaves’ cannot be directly associated with Matthew Paris, why continue to treat them as a copy of something originally produced by Matthew at St Albans? At the same time, there are niggling errors that the editors might have striven rather harder to eradicate. It is thus, to say the least, disconcerting to find Alexander iii described as a ‘Cistercian pope’ (p. 120), or Peter the Chanter (who died in 1197, recently-elected dean of Reims) as bishop in turn of both Tournai and Paris (p. 145). Likewise what are we to make of a series of ‘translations’ of texts (pp. 69–73) in which ‘applicat in Anglia’ becomes ‘approaches England’, ‘applicanti’ is both mis-transcribed and mistranslated (as ‘on arrival’, rather than as Becket, the traveller about to arrive), ‘naute’ (sailors) become a ‘ship’, and in which considerable confusion is shown by the modern translator (rather than, as she supposes, by Becket himself) over the identity of Milo, the count of Boulogne’s collector of passage money? Similar lapses can be found elsewhere, for instance at pp. 42–3 (where ‘(a)egrorum’ has become ‘ergorum’), at p. 155 (where the marriage of Eleanor daughter of Henry ii is said to have been negotiated in England, recte at Bordeaux), or at p. 332 where the archbishop of Sens has been demoted to the status of a mere bishop. Thank goodness, therefore, that broader brush strokes help disguise the occasional botched line. In particular, three essays are of particular excellence. Thus Elizabeth Valdez del Álamo supplies a census of early Castilian appearances by Becket, in art, liturgy and relics, more comprehensive than anything previously available. Naomi Speakman (albeit with peculiar indifference to Arthur Penrhyn Stanley’s 1855 Historical memorials of Canterbury) investigates early antiquarian interest in Becket, delightful not least for the comedies of errors she reveals, including the misinterpretation of an image of the coronation of the Virgin as a depiction of Henry ii and the ‘Fair Rosamund’, and another, showing Becket’s murder, misread as some sort of early masonic initiation ritual! Finally, Madeline Harrison Caviness, doyenne of all things related to Canterbury’s stained glass, retraces the steps by which the Becket ‘portrait window’, used as illustration to countless books, but in fact a pastiche (‘an appalling mishmash of old fragments and new glass’) not recorded before 1919, emerged from the same Canterbury workshop, of Samuel Caldwell the younger, from which, indirectly, Harvard’s Fogg Museum later acquired a smaller panel. Illustrating Becket on the day of his martyrdom refusing the pleas of his clerks and monks that he take refuge in the cathedral, this panel underwent significant (and in many eyes) excessive restoration in 2014. In an account as gripping as any good detective story, Caviness not only reveals the ways in which portrait and panel have been locked together since the 1920s in an ever-deepening saga of fakery and botched ‘improvement’, but the extent to which, however noble their intentions, the post-medieval custodians and restorers of Canterbury’s glass have perpetuated all manner of horrors, not least at the hands of Frederick Cole, self-certified expert wielder of the dentist’s high-speed brush, asked after 1972 by the canon in charge of the fabric to correct Latin names to English spellings so that they might be intelligible to ‘the man in the street’. Just as there are villains here, so there is a hero: the humble lead-glazier George Easton (1906–83) who, knowing ‘every ledge and roof of the cathedral’, was responsible for taking down the glass for safe storage after 1939, and in the late 1960s was still on site to assist Caviness in her first campaign of cataloguing. All told this is a most useful collection, supplied with good indexes both to names and subjects.